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3D First-Person Games, So Far
Gernot Ziegler writes: "One of my professors (Stefan Gustavsson) has written
a good summary that explains the history & technical background/innovations that Doom, Quake & Unreal brought with them when they were released.
Check it out." It's a pdf file. Gustavsson ends with a list of hopeful questions about where such games can go, after nearly a decade of running and violence. What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)
The statement about the DOOM file format being "more or less officially documented" is mentioned in several books and web sites that attempt to (re-)write the history of 3D games, but this is wrong. When DOOM was released, the WAD file format was not documented at all. It is only with the release of DOOM II that we got two useful pieces of information from John Carmack: a list of new LINEDEF types used in Doom II, and the source code for the BSP compiler in Objective-C. Several people (including myself) had decoded the WAD file format and written their own BSP compilers in the meantime, but the release of id's code allowed the developers of DOOM editors to compare different algorithms and to improve their editors.
I was a contributor to the "Unofficial Doom Specs" and the main author of DEU (Doom Editing Utilities). From December 1993 to April/May 1994, I spent a large amount of time reverse-engineering the WAD file format until I got the first working editor. To the credit of id Software, I must add that several things changed after the release of DOOM II: the unofficial level editors that were initially frowned upon (maybe not by John Carmack, but at least by Jay Wilbur, the biz guy) were allowed and even encouraged.
When Quake was released (first the QTest1 demo, then the full game), the same things happened, but a bit faster: initially, no information was released about the PAK file format, so I cooperated with Olivier Montannuy and others to write the "Unofficial Quake Specs". But soon after the game was released, John Carmack provided more information about the game, which allowed several good editors to be developed in a relatively short time. The usage of Quake-C allowed a lot of modifications without having to modify the executable, so that was another nice move.
-Raphaël
We were surprised at Wolf3D mods, but we knew it was going to happen with DOOM. I worked with some of the Wolf3D map editor guys before DOOM was even released, but they didn't wind up making the popular level editors.
The editor and utility source code was released quite early, but it was all for NeXT workstations in Objective-C, so it had to wait for someone to rewrite it for more conventional systems.
John Carmack
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash
Real life is already goal-free. Part of the allure of games is that they have goals. A goal-free virtual universe would at best be a novelty and a fad for a few moments.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
- There was a simple maze/combat game, whose name I don't quite recall (I'm thinking it was MazeWars) which offered a first-person perspective mode. Web searches turn up references to games of similar description on Sun workstations and Xerox Altos, which suggests an eaven earlier date than 1989.
- Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.
While DOOM may have popularized the FPS genre, it was nowhere near originating it.I will say, however, the DOOM, and Wolfenstein before it, were the first games to produce anything like a sense of real motion on non-workstation class hardware (I'd seen nausea inducing games on SGI workstations back in 1991, but most PCs and Macs couldn't render quickly, or smoothly, enough to fool the eye). I'm still impressed with what DOOM could do on a lowly 40MHz 386.
>It (DOOM) was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in
>computer science.
None of us had degrees in computer science. Romero, Adrian, and I don't have any degrees at all, and Kevin's is in political science.
>It even had a simple but multithreaded "operating system" of its own to handle asynchronous
>updates of graphics and playing sound while performing the game simulation.
No. We made the startup sequence busy and techie in a sort of imitation of the NeXT workstations we were using at the time, but there was no multithreading going on. The sound was done with interrupt driven processing, which doesn't qualify.
With the source code open for years, this should have been easy to check.
>a resolution of only 320x240
320x200
I would take issue with some of the other vague statements made later on, but they aren't pointed enough to debate.
John Carmack
The good folks who did Warbirds have been developing World War II Online ( http://www.wwiionline.com ).
There will be goals in the sense of successfully performing missions, being able to control campaigns by being able to post missions for others, etc. but you can pretty much wander around and drive/fly continuously from west France to Belgium- until the Me109s find you....
If you try this game please note the stringent hardware requirements and that it's a bit buggy/laggy due to the absolutely breathtaking scope of what they're doing.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.
What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there
This is definately one thing that has never been, "build it and they will come." Multiple people have tried building 3D worlds and they end up sucking. The main problem is that if a game is goal free, what's the point of being there? The coolness factor wears off in time, and users go back to communicating to people using a single window rather than a full screen environment.
The most likely way something anywhere near the Metaverse will originate will be through the current massive online games. As these game companies expand their product lines, multiple games are going to join into a single multipurpose game engine. The games themselves will only become a part of the social experience you're buying, you'll be able to wander around the "waiting rooms" with your avatar and talk to people. Exciting.
So in conclusing, the beginnings of the Metaverse are already here. Sign up for your EQ account today and get in on the ground floor, I suspect Verant will be providing what you're looking for in 5 years.
Ultima Underworld was out a month before Wolfensteinstein 3D.
Although he left out System Shock, I was pleased to see he at least mentioned Descent (but what does he mean by "the gaming environment was even more restricted than that of Doom"?) which offered true 3D environments ages before Quake claimed to be the first to do so.
Tomb Raider was the hardware "killer application", not Quake.
System Shock, Duke Nukem 3D, Magic Carpet, and Dark Forces were single player hits before Unreal and Half-Life hit the market.
Starsiege: Tribes was multiplayer only and came out six months before Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena.
Rainbow Six beat Counter-strike to the punch for coop play and realism.
But other than that the article was pretty much factually correct.
... here. (Boy, that was slashdotted fast.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
What I'd like to see is an easier way to make use of the 3-D engines for things like office/home walkthroughs and the like. I've looked into this in the past, but never found anything that was all that easy to use. We're currently building a home (well, a builder is) (well, they haven't finished the sewers yet, so they're not actually *building* our house yet, anyway), and the 3-D home design software we bought to help us visualize the interior of the home is, well, cumbersome. And the walkthroughs are horrible.
Why can't I find a quake/doom/whatever engine with a simple Visio-like front-end, so I can program in a whole house? Or office building? Or my neighborhood? (that'd look great on the web page...)
is to see who can drive the most traffic to a random PDF on the professor's website.
A+ for a slashdotting.
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E_NOSIG
Quick thought, definately not air tight:
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.. if we can invent any kind of ball, on any kind of field, with any kind of rules, why don't we see new sports being invented weekly? Certainly that would be more interesting? I say no; I think Q3 and UT are the 'equipment and vanue' to play Deathmatch (or arena, or ctf, or what have you). Sure, other games are sure to come along with their own unique and new concepts, but these online games are only as good as their popularity, community, and support (read: variety in competition), so it's likewise important that we dont try and re-invent the sport with every new game lest we drive off the community into more fractions that it already is. (And I should know .. I stuck around Quake 1 TF for 4 years, simply because nobody could 'copy' the game well enough using the current crop of games.) I think it's time to admit that videogames can easily have a playability of over 5 years .. while many people switch and update for the eyecandy, the real gamers value the subtle details like the physics and gameplay, and arn't neccessarily drooling for a whole new way of playing.
I thought it was interesting hearing him compare the current Q3 and UT type games as being basically the same. He says "the current state of 3D gaming is like a world where no one invented anything but football, and the only difference is what color jersey you wear [paraphrase]"
That maybe so, but football has been around for ages, and people still play it. Everyone knows the rules, and has a general idea of how to play with other people, etc
Nobody wants to learn a Whole New Game or Whole New Sport (especially after dropping 70 bucks for it), so I liken the online deathmatch community to the sports world
"Old man yells at systemd"